The imposition of form is in itself a warning: by its elevated nature it indicates its sovereign distance from all determinations, even from those ‘isms’ which reduce the irreducible unity of a thought system to the uniformity of a logical class; it also indicates its distance from all determinisms and especially the social determinisms which reduce the priceless individuality of a thinker to the banality of a (social) class. It is this distance, this difference which is explicitly instituted at the core of philosophical discourse in the form of the opposition between the ontological and the ontic (or anthropological) and which provides the already euphemized discourse with a second and impregnable line of defence: henceforth every word carries the indelible trace of the break which separates the authentically ontological sense from the ordinary and vulgar one, and which is sometimes
inscribed in the signifying substance by one of the phonological games (existentielUexistential) which have since been so often imitated. Thus the double-sided play with double-edged words is naturally extended to the warnings against ‘vulgar" and ‘vulgarly anthropological’ readings attempting to highlight the meanings that are negated but not refuted, and doomed by philosophical sublimation to the absent presence of a spectral existence: ‘The term “concern” has, in the first instance, its colloquial [vorwissenschaft-liche] signification, and can mean to carry out something, to get it done [erledigen], to “straighten it out”. It can also mean to "provide oneself with something”. We use the expression with still another characteristic turn of phrase when we say "I am concerned for the success of the undertaking". Here "concern" means something like apprehensiveness. In contrast to these colloquial ontical significations, the expression “concern" will be used in this investigation as an ontological term for an existentiale, and will designate the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world. This term has been chosen not because Dasein happens to be proximally and to a large extent “practical” and economic, but because the Beingof Dasein itself isto be made visible as care. This expression too is to be taken as an ontological structural concept. It has nothing to do with “tribulation", “‘melancholy”, or “the cares of life”, though ontically one can come across these in every Dasein.'x2
The imposition of a sharp divide between sacred and profane knowledge, which underlies the claims of all groups of specialists seeking to secure a monopoly of knowledge or sacred practice by constituting others as profane, thus takes on an original form: it is omnipresent, dividing each word against itself, as it were, by making it signify that it does not signify what it appears to signify, by inscribing within it — by placing it between inverted commas or significantly distorting its substantive meaning, or just setting it etymologically or phonologically within a tendentious lexical cluster — the distance which separates the ‘authentic’ from the ‘vulgar’ or ‘naive" sense.13 By discrediting the primary meanings which continue to function as a hidden prop for a number of relations constitutive of the overt system, one provides oneself with the possibility of taking the double-dealing a step further. Indeed, despite the anathema that is poured upon them, these negated meanings still fulfil a philosophical function, since they act at least as a negative referent in relation to which philosophical distance is established, the ‘ontological difference1 which separates the ‘ontological" from the ‘ontic’, i.e. the initiated from the lay person who alone is responsible,
